“We naturally, even from our cradles, love liberty.”
Lecture One: What Is the Meaning of Life?
Themes: Traditional Hierarchy? Liberty and/or Equality. Six Deep Questions about Ethics. What is ‘Modern’? Texts: Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
About the Instructor
Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy and the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Nietzsche and the Nazis, Entrepreneurial Living, Liberalism Pro and Con, and Eight Philosophies of Education. He has published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Review of Metaphysics, and The Wall Street Journal. His writings have been translated into twenty languages. He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great (Poland), Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College (Oxford University), and Visiting Professor at Jagiellonian University (Poland).
About the Course
In this eight-lecture, ten-hour course, Professor Hicks takes us on an engaging journey through the evolution of modern moral philosophy, from the Enlightenment to the 21st century. Major thinkers covered include:
John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ruth Benedict, A.J. Ayer, and Philippa Foot.
Trailer and enrollment options at the Peterson Academy site here.
See also Professor Hicks’s Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Philosophy courses.
WHAT IS the MEANING OF LIFE ?
Write poetry.
Every philosophy you talk about, I will destroy them intellectually. I don’t like them. I never liked them.
Because I am a poet.
Prince – 1999 (Official Music Video) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rblt2EtFfC4
I don’t think I’ve heard a more beautiful version.
Vásáry André – Ennio Morricone: Once Upon a Time in the West / Volt egyszer egy vadnyugat :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC20KYQxtWs
Poetry is above philosophy.
Because she is not an idealist.
The first thing for a philosopher to understand is that poetry is the “mother” of philosophy.
If you don’t know this, you will be a bad philosopher.
Prince – Purple Rain (Official Video) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvnYmWpD_T8
You once believed that you might be, that you were greater than the poet.
In the hierarchy, after God, there is the poet.